15a: Grounded
by cathrl
Summary: Everyone knew that G-Force couldn't carry on doing it all forever... right?
1. Chapter 1

"We need to ground G-Force."

That wasn't the report Anderson had expected from Chris Johnson. From the other shocked faces round the table, he wasn't alone.

"Go on," he said.

"They're verging on clinical exhaustion. They're making bad calls because they feel they have no alternative to taking risks."

"Sometimes they don't have an alternative," said Ivanov.

"As long as they're the one active team, no. But I'm telling you this officially, as G-Force's team doctor. As a team, they are on a downward spiral. Sooner rather than later, one of them will make a call which is fatal to one or more of them. It'll be quite deliberate, and it will save lives. And it will be something which a fully fit team wouldn't have needed to do."

"Putting Mark back in was a mistake," said Grant. 'I told you so' was unsaid, but obvious.

Johnson shook his head, looking round the briefing room. He was concerned enough not to rise to Grant's needling, which in itself was a sign of how serious he thought this was. "G-1's the least of my worries," he said. "He's fresh and sharp. His spiral's upwards. But he trusts his team to make their own calls, and it's a disaster waiting to happen. We've had our wakeup call. I don't think you fully appreciate just how close we came to losing Tiny. I'm sorry to be blunt, but I have one question I'd like a clear answer to. Are you ever going to activate Force Two as a second team, or is the plan to wait until G-Force doesn't come back?"

"Absolutely _not_ ," Anderson found himself saying. He didn't remember standing up, either. "If I thought they weren't coming back..."

He stopped. There were circumstances under which he'd send them out anyway. He couldn't deny it. Not to these people, who might well be in the position of having to make that call themselves.

He sat down again. Heavily. "Let's discuss options," he said. "Major?"

Grant actually looked nervous. "I don't think Force Two will get any more ready without actual combat experience. We can't get them up to G-Force's level in the simulators. Not going to happen."

"I won't use them as cannon fodder," Anderson said, hoping that was obvious.

"We can pick a simple mission -" Ivanov started.

Grant got in there before Anderson could. "No, we can't. One: we never know beforehand. Two: it'll never be simple enough that sending G-Force wouldn't be safer. Unless we consider sending them out for things we wouldn't send G-Force for. I think that would be a dreadful idea. When we do use them, they need to have the advantage of surprise."

Anderson nodded. He and Grant had discussed this extensively, and had reluctantly come to the conclusion that any extra experience their novice team could gain from supporting ISO's conventional forces would be more than outweighed by the additional risk of Spectra knowing in advance that they existed.

"Three," said Johnson, "there are a number of medical reasons to ground G-Force completely for a while. The obvious one is to let Tiny heal properly. The more pressing one is Keyop."

"Keyop?" Ivanov sounded genuinely shocked. He had, Anderson supposed, known the kid from infancy.

"Keyop. He's not growing. There are no signs of him starting puberty. I don't think it's going to happen without drugs. I'm concerned it's already been left too long."

 _Oh, man_. 'The kid.' Small, excitable, sometimes annoying, looked about twelve. Had done so ever since he'd come here. Anderson did the math. He couldn't be far off eighteen.

For once, even Grant had nothing sarcastic to say. And Anderson's mind was made up.

"Let's do this. Chris, you give them the treatment they need. We all know what's needed to make Force Two our primary team. Let's do it, effective immediately."

"G-Force are not going to like it," Ivanov said.

"No, they're not." He activated the desktop communicator. "G-1, report to briefing room one immediately."

"On my way," said Mark's voice, and the connection clicked closed.

Anderson looked around at a table full of worried faces. "Leave this to me. You go get the changeover started."

Mark would, he was fairly sure, take it personally. Maybe a one-to-one meeting wouldn't look like a permanent grounding. He hoped.

* * *

"They're grounding us."

There wasn't a good way to say it, and Mark hadn't tried. Jason was still on his feet faster than thought, his face furious.

"And you _let_ them?"

"It's not my call. Force Two have five fully fit members. We now have three. Sorry, guys."

Jason's expression changed just slightly. "Don't apologise for being human."

Behind him, from the computer terminal, there was a sound suspiciously like a sob.

"Keyop?" said Princess.

"My fault," the kid said. "Not... human."

"Don't be daft." Normal Jason sympathy there.

"Not human," Keyop repeated, louder and more desperate. "Hormones don't work. Chris says, now we're grounded he can treat it with drugs. You think it was that way round? Emailed me three minutes ago. Good timing. Too good."

He buried his head in his hands as Princess, face white, hurried across to put her arm round him.

"Keyop," said Mark carefully, "do you want to discuss it?"

"Probably should." It was muffled and very unhappy.

.

It felt wrong to be holding this sort of discussion without Tiny. He'd always been there; when they'd lost Princess, when Jason had been so ill. Mark suspected he'd been there when it was Mark himself in trouble and missing. Now he was propped up in Medical, too sore to lie flat. Every time Mark had seen him, he'd been barely awake. Which at least meant that his implant was doing its job. He hoped.

Jason brought two mugs of coffee to the table, and Princess followed with whatever her preferred concoction was for herself and Keyop. Impossible to tell, with that much cream and marshmallow. When Keyop finally raised his head, there were tears in his eyes.

"Okay, Keyop," Mark said as reassuringly as he could. "From the top."

He recognised the 'hold your mug tight enough and your hands won't shake' trick. And the 'drink slowly to put off the moment' one. He'd been there. It had been awful, and it had been unexpected. But Keyop? He'd thought he would have noticed that the kid was having medical problems.

It was rapidly becoming an awkward silence when Keyop finally put the mug down and cleared his throat nervously. "I... I'm not human. Should have started puberty years ago. Chris thinks he can kickstart it artificially. Lots of drugs. Not compatible with jump."

"Did he just tell you this?" Princess asked. She had an arm round his shoulders.

"No. Known for a while."

"Then why didn't you tell us?" Mark asked before he could stop himself. "You can have medical leave, Keyop. As much as you need. Any time." A sudden unpleasant thought struck him. "Keyop, were you afraid I'd say no?"

The kid - no, Mark reminded himself, he's pushing eighteen, he's not a kid - stared at him desperately, lip trembling.

"No," said Jason, not a hint of sarcasm in his tone. "He was afraid you'd say yes."

 _Oh, crap. Of course he was_. Awful, awful choice. Especially for Keyop, physically small and without any of the critically rare skills a jump-team couldn't operate without. He must have been terrified that 'we can manage without you for a while' would turn into 'actually, we can do better.'

Except that Keyop was good at his job. Quite apart from his abilities as an engineer, he was useful physically. His small size often made him the best choice for infiltration...

... and would stop being an advantage for him if he grew to anywhere near the size of an average eighteen year old.

"Crap." He didn't realise he'd said it out loud until he heard it, and saw Jason and Princess staring at him.

"Keyop," he said simply, "go get the treatment you need. You know I can't promise anything, But there isn't anyone else I'd trust in your seat right now, let alone choose over you."

"Didn't want this," Keyop said unhappily.

"I know. But we're grounded anyway. Go talk to Chris about what you need. You want me to come with you?"

That got half a smile. "No."

The Swallow stopped at the door and looked back, just for a moment. "Thanks." The door closed behind him, and Mark looked round at what was left of his team. Three of them. Two and a half, if he was honest with himself.

"It's not over," Jason said simply, and pointed at Mark's forgotten mug of coffee. "Drink that. Then I'm going to kick you all round the dojo. When Keyop and Tiny are back, your fitness is _not_ going to be an excuse for them to keep us grounded."

He downed it in three gulps and stood up. "No. It isn't."

* * *

"They've grounded G-Force."

The reaction in the Force Two ready room was utter disbelieving silence. Long, awkward, frozen.

"What does this mean for us?" Dimitri asked finally, carefully and quietly.

Rick looked around. They'd waited for this moment. Dimitri in particular had waited for a very long time. It didn't seem real that it was happening. From the expression on Grant's face as Anderson had told him the news, he wasn't the only one who struggled to believe it.

"It means we're the primary team as of now. If the alarm goes off, assume that we will be responding."

He saw Jenny gulp.

"Is anyone not happy with this? If so, say so."

"We're ready," said Dylan. "Past ready."

Jenny swallowed again, and then burst into tears.

Rick stamped hard on the part of himself which wanted to make a sarcastic comment about assigning a fifteen year old girl to a combat team, even if she was the only jump-calculator in ISO who wasn't already on G-Force. "What's the problem?" he asked.

"I thought they'd give us something easy." She stared at him, eyes wide and horrified. "If the alarm goes off, it's us? No matter what?"

"G-Force is down to three fit members. What else are we here for? But you think I'll get you killed? I'm hurt."

He'd intended it to be reassuring in a slightly joky way, but Jenny swallowed again.

"No, I think _I'll_ get _you_ killed. We all know I'm not as ready as the rest of you. Nowhere close."

"We all know," said Paula. "We're good at different things. We compensate for one another. G-Force do the same. Rick's not going to throw you into combat."

"No. I know that. I'm going to practice." She got up and walked out, looking at nobody, spine rigid.

"Should I go after her?" Rick asked nobody in particular.

"No," said Paula decisively. "Let her be alone for a bit. I'll check on her later."


	2. Chapter 2

"Jason? Can I talk to you?"

Jason glanced sideways in between strikes of the punching bag. Alternate hands and feet. "You are talking to me."

"With you listening."

 _Rick Shayler, all the tact of a teapot._ Jason stopped at the end of the next sequence and steadied the bag, resisting the urge to snap back. It wasn't Rick's fault that G-Force was grounded, he reminded himself. Though if this was some attempt to rub his nose in it...

"Go on."

"I'm worried about Jenny. She didn't react well to the news."

"And what am I supposed to do about it?"

"I hoped you could reassure her that she's ready. Heck, I hoped you could reassure _me_ that she's ready."

"You need to ask Grant or Sheridan. One of the people who's been training her."

"I want the truth, not the party line."

Something in his voice rang all the alarm bells in Jason's mind. The 'party line' would, of course, be that she was ready, they were all ready, everything was wonderful. Goodness only knew, Rick had played that game himself in front of the press and even black section staff, smiling and joking about how everything was wonderful in the new G-Force. They'd been falling apart at the time.

And they'd still been on active duty. Not a mention of standing them down.

 _He doesn't know why it's happened now. And he doesn't trust anyone else to tell him._

Jason stripped off his pads and dropped them on the bench. "Come on. I'm not discussing this in public." Outside would do. He'd come back and shower later, when he was done playing nursemaid.

.

"You're ready," he finished. "Anderson wouldn't have grounded us for any of that otherwise. Would he?"

"I guess not." Rick swallowed visibly. "Damn, I thought I was ready for this. I'm supposed to be the confident one."

Jason snorted. "Then fake it. That's what they need."

Rick glanced at him in surprise. Opened his mouth and closed it again. Came to a decision.

"Is that what you do?"

"Hell yes. It's what we all do. You never figured it out?"

"Well, yes. Be right or be wrong, but don't be unsure." His expression twisted as he looked out to sea. "It didn't occur to me that you still needed to fake it. I thought you just knew how to be right. I thought I'd be past needing to fake it by now."

"You'll never be past needing to fake it." He considered the man sitting next to him, who'd tried and failed to become an integral part of G-Force. Jason knew just how much of that was down to him. And if he was ever going to say it...

"For what it's worth? Me not using you? I couldn't be unsure so I went for being wrong. At least some of the time. It was a damn sight safer. But I had three other people who I knew I could use. You're about to have four people as inexperienced as you were under your command. You're going to have to trust them. And I don't envy you."

He left Rick staring out to sea, and headed back towards the buildings. The Kite would be fine. He hoped.

* * *

"Jason? I was looking for you."

He bit back his snarled response. Don was fragile. And Don was one of the few people with absolutely no responsibility for G-Force being grounded. He stopped and deliberately lost the glare before turning round.

"Yeah?"

"It's Jenny. Can you come talk to her?"

He snorted before he could stop himself. "About how of course she's ready to replace me? Hell no."

"How about 'of course she's ready to calculate a real jump'?"

"If she needs me to tell her that, she's not ready."

"Like you never lost your nerve."

Jason almost hit him. Anyone else would have been on the floor for saying that. But Don had been there himself. Still was. Still couldn't face the outdoors, or even an open window. For someone who'd lived to fly, it must be beyond miserable.

But he had learned to deal with everyday life. There were windows in the corridor they stood in now, though Don had stopped before he stood right next to one. There were even windows in the gym where he trained with the Kestrel.

Young Jenny had needed - still did need, in Jason's opinion - hour upon hour of sparring practice, preferably with a fellow implantee who didn't massively outsize her. Putting her and Don together had been one of his better ideas. He'd expected Mark to throw a fit, but he'd been surprisingly relaxed about it. Possibly his commander had realised that the obvious alternative candidate was himself, and hadn't much fancied being kicked round the dojo by a super-fit fifteen year old girl revelling in her implant.

Don was ideal. He'd always been short and slight, he was sufficiently out of practice that the kid had been better than him to start with, and sufficiently skilled and motivated that, from things he'd heard, she'd had a major struggle to stay better than him. She'd hit the gym, he'd hit the gym, and now she was nowhere near as far behind her team-mates as she had been, and he was back up to being worthy of the black belt he wore.

Jason hadn't considered, and probably should have done, that Don would have discussed other aspects of her training with her. Don was, after all, probably the second most naturally talented jump-pilot in ISO. Not that he'd be sharing that particular opinion with either Mark or Dylan.

 _Crap._

"Tell me she's ready. Then tell me how you know."

Don met his eyes, unrepentant. "She's ready, and I know because I've run the jump-simulator for her when the Raven's been unavailable. And no, I didn't ask permission."

 _Because you know full well you wouldn't have got it._ Jason wondered whether Jenny would have realised that. Probably not.

He wouldn't have asked either.

"Okay," he said, "so what do you want me to do? She's been cleared by Grant, you realise?"

Don actually grinned. "She thinks you're the Second Coming. Possibly because some moron gave her access to the G-Force mission logs. Right now she's hysterical about the last one. I only glanced at it over her shoulder - but, Jason, what the hell were you thinking?"

Jason swore in several languages. It didn't help.

"Do _you_ want to talk about it?"

"Hell no. Where's the kid?"

"Simulator room."

.

Jenny was sitting at the jump-calculator's training console in tears. That horrendous, red lights everywhere set of jump data was laid out in front of her on one screen, and his half-guessed last ditch solution on the other.

"I can't do it," she said without turning round. "I can't see it. I'm sorry. I know there's nobody else. But this... I can't. It isn't a solution." She gulped. "I've seen the tapes. This is what you had and this is what you jumped on. I'd have given Dylan something else, and..."

Jason sat alongside her, in the seat used by the jump-pilot. _Oh, for a tenth of Mark's diplomatic tact._

"You'd have jumped with that many red lights?"

"You did, sir."

Jason sighed. Perfectly logical. From where she was sitting, which seemed to be a place without all the information.

"You must know what the real jump-equations look like?"

"You mean before we start approximating?"

"Exactly. Before we take out the negligible terms, and assume some things are constant, and other things cancel, and a whole bunch of things which are no longer true when those red lights come on."

"Oh," she said. "Oh. But I don't..."

He reached across and called up the unedited version of the equations. They took up the best part of a screen. Hideously difficult non-linear partial differential equations. Nobody could solve them analytically. The best computers on the planet struggled to solve them numerically.

The Kestrel took one look at them, made a desperate, unhappy sound, and threw up on the floor.

And Jason went to the bracelet. "G-1," he said, "I need you in the simulator room, right now."


	3. Chapter 3

_I have died and gone to hell._

Jenny didn't dare look up. He thought she could solve _that_? Her head hurt, her stomach roiled, and the only thing she could think was that at least she'd thrown up on the floor rather than the console.

He'd called the Eagle. Well, the Eagle had seen just how good she was in other areas. Not. Any minute now, someone would tell her that her services were no longer required and take her bracelet away. Would they make her face her team-mates? She wasn't sure she could. They thought they'd finally got their chance. They were going to be so horribly disappointed.

The door opened. "Mark's on his way," said a female voice. Not even Paula, which would have been bearable. Footsteps across the room, and an arm round her shoulders. "Jen, what's wrong?"

"I can't do it," she choked out. Just what she needed to complete her humiliation: all three senior members of G-Force.

"What's the problem?" Yup, that was the Eagle. "Shouldn't Rick be dealing with this?"

She gathered all her nerve and willed her voice to stay steady. "It's okay, Commander. I'll go give him my resignation."

"Like hell you will." That was the Condor. "Mark, she's been shafted. Some idiot gave her our last mission tape."

"The one with the solution so unstable they're still trying to replicate it numerically?"

"That's the one. Since she threw up when I started trying to explain it, I figured it was best coming from someone she knew."

Not that she knew Mark very well. But he'd been patient and understanding when she'd been in the throes of space-sickness. He'd helped her through it, an hour at a time when necessary.

Now, he snorted. "As if I can explain it. I agree, though. Not one for Rick, not yet. You need the simulator?"

"Computer'll do just fine."

"Then let's do this in the ready room. Come on, Kestrel. Go clean up, and then we'll sort this out."

She stood up shakily, vaguely aware that Princess had called for a janitor, and too unhappy to care.

.

The Condor was waiting for her when she came out of the bathroom, feeling a little better for having rinsed her mouth and splashed water on her face. He said nothing, just left in the direction of the ready rooms. Following him seemed the only thing to do.

The G-Force ready room was much like the Force Two one, except that everything was much more worn. They'd spent a lot of time in here. Years of sitting and waiting for the next emergency. She'd faced that for a couple of hours and already she couldn't handle it.

"Sit there," said Jason when she hesitated just inside the doorway, pointing to a computer terminal in the corner.

She did so. Princess presented her with a glass of something ginger-based, and she sipped it carefully.

Jason brought a second chair over, and sat alongside her, firing the terminal up. "You going to throw up again when I show you something you can't solve?" he asked.

"No." As she said it, she was sure. It wasn't unexpected now. Still horrible, still terrifying, but if she turned off the part of her brain which autotranslated equations to graphs, it was fine.

"I'm not going to explain the entire reduction process to you," Jason said bluntly as he set the computer up. "You don't have enough maths to understand it, and it doesn't matter to you. All you need to do is watch the red lights. If one of them's lit, there are values too large to be negligible. Abort if you can. If you can't, it'll be the jump from hell but you'll be fine. Two or more... well, the more there are, the less resemblance what you're solving bears to the real thing."

That made sense. A whole lot more sense than the previous explanations. Explanations given, she realised now, by mathematical theorists rather than someone who did her job for real.

Jason was looking at her. Expectantly, she suspected. And he was the one person who might understand.

"What if you have a bunch of red lights and you have no choice?"

"There's always a choice. You're in a warship, kid. If you can't make the jump then you turn and fight. Or you get that kickass pilot of yours to get you out of trouble in realspace. Or the Crane gets on the jump-comm and calls in help. It's not all down to you."

"But you..."

"I've done all those things multiple times. I've gone for jump through multiple red lights _once_ , in five years, and it was three days ago - you've got access to the logs, check them if you don't believe me. I don't expect you to do it ever. You tell your commander there's no solution and you sit back. If anyone gives you grief about it, point them at me. If your pilots can't set up an approach which gives you decent numbers, that's their problem. Don't make it yours."

"And they can," said Princess from over at the table. "Jen, what Jason's talking about is really very unlikely. You've got to focus on your job and what you can do, rather than what might go wrong with everyone else's. You've just got to."

"Yes, mother," said Jason, and Jenny swallowed her own response in shock. That hadn't been aimed at her. It had been aimed at the Condor, and he'd acknowledged it. It wasn't just her. If _he_ could feel like that, maybe she could do this after all.

"Now then," he said, and the sardonic tone was back, "I'm going to show you my solution to this, so you don't go spare trying to figure it out. And then you're going to go forget about it and remember that you can do the standard setups in your sleep. Deal?"

She nodded, and actually meant it.

* * *

"So," said Mark a couple of minutes after the door had shut behind a much happier Jenny, "do I go tell Anderson about this?"

Jason shrugged, flicking the computer switch off. "I don't think they're ready, period. But I don't think this makes them any less ready. What's the worst that can happen? Anderson sends them out, she freezes at the jump-point, they come home, we go instead. End of."

"I think she'll be fine," said Princess.

There was a long pause.

"So, said Mark, "I guess we're on vacation? We don't need to stay here. We finally get to have a break. Jason - you could go do one of those international races you keep having to turn down."

 _You don't get it, do you?_ Jason expected Princess to say something, but she was fiddling with something at the table. He knew make-work when he saw it.

"We need to be ready to go help them," he said.

"I..." said Princess. To his horror, she appeared to be close to tears.

"Nothing's changed," Mark said to her. To Jason, he said, "No, G-2. You've got to leave it."

"But what if -"

His commander got to his feet, almost smoothly. "Walk with me," he said. It wasn't a request.

.

Mark led Jason outside in silence, heading, it was soon apparent, for the clifftop overlooking the deep water bay. Down there somewhere was the underwater entrance to the Phoenix's hangar. In just the right light and tide conditions you could see some of the machinery housing deep underwater, if you knew what to look for. Today the light was flat and grey and the tide was high. Nothing to be seen except choppy waves, seagulls, and one lone seal.

"Princess needs a break," Mark said, sitting on the grass close to the edge of the cliff. "She's having a miserable time with her wisdom teeth, they need to come out, and it's complicated. Surgery, general anaesthetic, and painkillers afterwards. You have to stop making her think that putting it off for another few days is worthwhile."

"For toothache?"

Mark looked sideways at him. "Remind me how long you were sidelined with a headache."

"I guess." He sat in silence, watching the gulls wheel and dive.

"I hate this," Mark burst out. "Before, when I left, at least I knew it was still G-Force out there. Just me missing. Now..."

"Now it's Force Two, backed up by you and me." Jason shook his head. Reassuring wasn't exactly his strong point. "The others will be back. And if Princess needs her teeth fixed, now's as good a time as any."

"Maybe they won't be needed. Princess should be back inside a week. Tiny can't take much longer than that, surely? Keyop - I don't know, and I doubt Chris will tell me. But we've often had quiet patches for a couple of weeks. We just splashed three mecha. We could get lucky."

Jason groaned. "You had to say that, didn't you?"

They sat in silence, listening for an emergency siren. For now, the only sounds were the birds and the waves far below.


End file.
